


And Then A Third, A Fourth, A Fifth

by Wikiaddicted723



Series: Boot Theory [2]
Category: Fringe
Genre: Fringe Secret Santa, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:59:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wikiaddicted723/pseuds/Wikiaddicted723
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what they were always meant to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Bridge (Prologue)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CiderApples](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/gifts).



> Written for 2013's Fringe Exchange, as of yet unfinished but entirely plotted out. Unbeated. As always, only the mistakes are mine.  
> Um, also...did I fail to mention this is the future of Boot Theory? *slithers quietly under a rock and types until the end of time...or the end of the fic*

When the time comes, and the worlds are ending, they are ready. 

Ready, in a way that Walter and William could not predict, because for all their objectives, for all their claims that their work was for humanity’s sake, they forgot along the way that their soldiers were human as well. They gave them strength, and from that strength came, unforeseen, weakness. They gave them abilities, focused on their capacity for feeling, but they forgot their tenacity, their instincts. They could not predict their willingness for sacrifice. 

They saw potential in a girl to lead them, and they focused on her, made her better, made her worse. They succeeded, and with success, the illusion of control ceased.

There was no predicting Olivia, and Olivia never cared for their plans. 

Now the children, they stand in a circle at the point of convergence, off the coast of New York, Lady Liberty’s weight firm over them as they assemble below. Olivia stands at the center, their origin point. With her, the wildcard, the madman’s son, orbiting as always.  He will remain until the end, not for the worlds that are his, one by choice, one by birth, but for her. She needs him there. 

He stands before her, hands on her hips, cheek on cheek, his jaw rough on hers, her cheekbone sharp and smooth against his. He pulls back, makes the drag of skin on skin abrasive, deliberate. He looks at her. He asks, “You ready for this?” The tone of it is steady, it does not betray him. 

“No,” Olivia says, a hand on his neck, thumb against the hollow at its base. She finds his eyes.  “Peter…” she starts. 

 “Don’t.” He shakes his head with vehemence, knows what she’ll say, can’t let her. Spreads his palms on her cheeks, thumbs on each arc, below her eyes, every other digit cradling the shape of her skull on either side, as if the contact will physically stop the words from leaving her mouth. He says, “Tell me later. ‘Livia, you’ll tell me later.”

She chuckles, and smiles that smile that calls him, fondly, a fool. She touches her lips to his, and it’s short, and warm and it feels too much like goodbye. She says it anyway. Says, “I love you,” and she means it, and it’s the first time. 

“Tell me you’re not going to die.” It’s a whisper, a whimper, a demand. 

“I can’t.” She pets his face like you’d pet a lion, an overgrown kitten, firmly and with careful fingers. Fingers running against the end of his hair at the back of his neck, up behind the shell of his ear, down the slope of his jaw.

“Then lie,” Peter begs her. “Lie.”

Olivia takes his hands from her face, one by one, hugs him as tight as she can. In his ear, she breathes, “I’m not going to die.” Her chin on his shoulder, she finds Nick looking on, waiting. She nods for them to begin. Feels the fabric of the world tear and buzz and the fear build.

Before she fades away, she hears him say, “I love you, too.” Then a burst of light, then the void swallowing the light. A feeling like crumbling, like being torn asunder, of falling to pieces, of bone and blood and violent nonsense. Then nothing. And Nothing is a river, still, calm, deep enough to drown.

She doesn’t die. In a thousand ways, what happens is worse.

She saves them all. 

 


	2. Year One

Olivia sacrifices herself for the worlds, and Peter understands that she always knew she would.

There are no secrets between them. Not anymore.

*****

It is three months and fifteen days after zero hour when Peter hears her voice next. He’s exhausted, has lost count of the number of days since he last closed his eyes for longer than a power nap at night. Booze stopped doing the trick around month one, after he nearly left his liver on the toilet seat for the third time, woke up cold and miserable and alone, curled up on the bathroom’s floor with his cheek stuck to the tiles between the toilet and the tub. In a sudden, clearly drunken moment of clarity, couldn’t help but think how disappointed she’d be of him. He hasn’t had more than a drink after dinner since.

There’s a paralyzing fear that grips him, a fear of missing things, of being away and unable to help when, not if, something happens to her. It keeps sleep away, because something always happens. Something always breaks.

He’s sitting beside her at the center of the cage, holding the back of her hand to his cheek, thinking she’d hate it. When he’d argued against it, they had not quite understood that he knew perfectly well why they wanted to lock the origin of the time-space displacement in a faraday cage. They needed to keep it stable, keep it contained. It was not the nature of her prison that he made his case against. It was their need to make it into an observation deck, to watch and probe and experiment.

She’d hate the attention. She’d hate, once again, being the rat in their maze. 

There are layers to the cage. The outside, the aluminum over the iron mesh supporting the shielding of lead, leads into a corridor, and the corridor runs along the edges of the pillar of plexiglass around the center. And the center is her and the altar they’ve built for her comatose body to rest on, a gurney molded to her shape like the bottom half of a cocoon, where she lies ghostly pale, all in white. From her hand, an IV, keeping her alive. At her temples, electrodes, wires leading back to the the mass of silver equipment lying against the transparent wall at forty-five degrees from her left temple, half of the monitors of the machines looking in, the other half turned to the corridor for the doctors to see.

They rarely come in after the one man that went up in flames and turned to ash the second he slipped a needle into the crook of her arm—he’d been trying to get a batch of blood to the labs. She’s never handled vulnerability well.

Walter and Astrid and Frank, Nick when he visits and brings Lincoln in tow. Peter. These are the people that what’s left of Olivia lets in. These are the people she trusts to come close enough to breathe the same air, close enough to touch and not put her in harm’s way. 

It gives him hope, on the good days. The days he lets himself speak, lets himself tell her about his day like she’s about to roll over and press her ear to his chest, feel the rumble of his voice while she listens to his words. She used to do that, in the brief life they lived together on the other side, when they played spies, still believed they were fighting a war. 

Today Peter reads to her, uses the words of other men because all he has to say is _I miss you_ , and _I wish I could be sure you were still in there_ , and he hopes in vain. When his eyes burn and he can no longer focus on the words, he sets the book down, lets go of her hand. He rises to his feet, finds his calves have fallen asleep. Checks his watch. 

Her hair was shorn, by Astrid's hand under Walter's orders, cut so short he can barely weave his fingers through the locks when he leans down to touch her cool forehead with his own. Easier to keep it clean like this, he'll admit, but a tragedy anyway. Another one in the row.

He kisses her cheek. Lingers. The pillow smells like her. “Good night, sweetheart.” 

For a moment, he thinks he hears her whisper back, say “good night,” using a tone that suggests a smile. He pulls away so fast he trips when he steps back, falls into the chair he left behind with a screech of its legs against the sterile-white tile. When he manages to stand, he stares at her, finds the same closed eyes and unmoving shape, stable readings on the machines, their metronome beeping unchanged. He tugs at the hair on his nape, closes his eyes, sways on his feet. He sighs. The sigh becomes a chuckle, and the chuckle a snicker, and the snicker a laugh.

  _Shit._

Peter buries his face in his palms. There’s a knock against the glass, the release of pressurized air as the door to the chamber slides to the side. A steady hand on his arm.

“Peter?”

He turns towards the voice. “Astrid, hey. Something wrong?”

Astrid shakes her head. The tight curls of her hair wave back and forth with a half-second delay. “Walter was worried,” she says. She scans the room, finds everything but him stable and unchanged. Doesn’t comment on it. “Ready to go home?”

_I am home._

The thought is automatic, defensive. She’d understand, if he said it, but all it would get him would be careful treatment and a pitying smile. It never leaves his mouth. “Sure. Let me just grab my stuff from the locker room. I’ll meet you outside.” 

*

Astrid drops him off, and pushes a cardboard box of raspberry danishes into his hands before he exits her silver sedan. She pleads, “Make sure your father doesn't eat them all at once?”

“Yeah, you don't have to warn me about that.” He makes an effort to smile back, steps out of the car. “I was there the last time. Drive safe.”

“Always. Peter?”

“Hmm?”

“Go to sleep.”

He raises two fingers to his temple, an informal salute. “Yes, ma'am.” Closes the door and watches the car peel off.

The night watchman nods his greeting as Peter crosses the threshold into the building. From then on, motion becomes automatic: get to the elevator, push the button, ride it up, walk down the hall, grab the keys, open the door, close the door. And inside the door, the small, single bedroom IKEA that they call their home these days, courtesy of Massive Dynamic and looking just as cold, just as sparse, just as plain. 

The smell of something synthesizing oozes from the kitchen. 

Peter drops the keys on the bowl atop the catch-all table, hangs his coat on its knob on the smooth wooden hanger that, like the rest of the apartment, is perfectly functional but lacks warmth and personality. He pushes his shoes off with his toes. 

In the kitchen, a bunsen burner heats the bottom of a beaker with something slime-green in it. Walter hums Bowie with his back to the door and the beaker, chopping vegetables and strips of chicken, pausing only to drop them methodically on the boiling saucepan and stirring them into dinner.

“Hey, Walter.”

“Peter! I didn’t hear you come in.” Shuffling steps bring the old man close enough to touch, to place a smooth hand on his arm and give him a light push toward the nearest stool. 

“Astrid sent these.” Peter puts the box on the kitchen island, a safe(ish) distance away from the fire and the monster goo. He refuses the seat. “She said not to let you eat them all at once like the last time.”

Predictably, his father disregards that last part, skipping over it like the words were never uttered. He digs into one of the cold, flaky pastries with a crunchy bite. Between mouthfuls, he says, “Perhaps this time I will finally figure out the secret ingredient!”

“You do that. I’m gonna go to bed, see if I can get some sleep.”

Walter stops in his tracks, drops the danish to look at him with worried eyes and worried grooves under and around them. “But don’t you want to eat first? I’m making us chicken soup. Your mother's recipe.”

“Not hungry. Save mine for later?”

“Son, is everything okay? Is Olivia…”

“She’s fine, Walter. The same as when you left. Stable.” Same as yesterday, and the day before, and the hundred and seven days before then. But who’s counting, anyway? “I’m just tired.”

After that, Walter lets him go, crestfallen, but without comment. Inside the bedroom, Peter strips, drops down over the covers, earphones around his head, cellphone in hand. He props it up on the bedside table, against the lamp, lets the screen scan his thumb. Once he’s been granted access into Massive Dynamic’s secure ftp, it’s only a matter of traveling a well worn path through the server until he finds what he wants.

The steady beating of a comatose heart floods his ears, shows up in peaks and valleys on the device, white on black. Without meaning to, it pulls him under. Exhaustion wins. Without meaning to, Peter sleeps.

*

Soft light filters through the windows, warm but uneven. What wakes him up is the shadow behind his eyelids, moving in the room. A weight dipping the mattress, calloused fingertips on his brow. 

“Rough night?” Olivia lying beside him, head of long golden hair spilt on the pillow, pillow on top of the bend of her arm. The bend of her arm making her elbow an arrow pointing at the inside of the linen field of empty between its brackets of flesh, built of his body and hers. He knows with absolute certainty that if he reached for her he’d find nothing but space, and he’d still see her there. 

“This is a dream,” he pronounces, moronic, dumbfounded. 

Olivia smiles, and the smile wrinkles her nose and makes half-moons of her eyes. Her cheek digs into the pillow. “Is it? How can you tell?”

“You’re here.” 

“I want to be.” She looks puzzled for a moment. Then, “I can go, if you want me to.”

Peter shakes his head. “Don’t. Stay with me. Just for a little.”

She stays. She crawls closer to him, the emptiness between them disappearing inch by inch. When she presses against him, it’s as if he’s been singed. He flinches, but makes himself remain still. Doesn’t want her to leave. She holds him tight, and with the rhythm of her breathing comes a sense of unease. She says, sweetly, “I’m always with you.” And then she pushes _through_ him, and the pain begins. 

She stays. Rips his chest wide open, pulls his ribs out. Crawls inside. Seals herself in.

In his dream and outside of it, Peter screams.

*

When Walter gets to him he’s only half awake, fallen on the bedroom’s floor beside a small patch of vomit showing only the remnants of a halfhearted breakfast, curling on himself like paper on fire, on its way to ashes. Drowning in sweat. He’s clutching at his head, clawing at the floorboards in spasms, speaking, or trying to speak, in languages that aren’t his.

Walter catches Farsi, and German, pieces of Arabic. Between them, English, halves of curses, pleading. He grabs the extra blanket on the chair by the pile of clothes Peter shed, crouches on the floor beside him with his heart in his throat, the memory of despair badly locked behind a cracked door, ever-present, lurking at the edges. _Can’t lose him again_ is a well worn chant to every fragment of his damaged mind. 

 And then Peter speaks, and it is his voice but they are not his words, not his thoughts.

“Peter? Peter?” 

Oh. Oh dear. This is inconvenient. “Olivia?”

“Walter? Walter, I think I hurt him. I was—I felt him close. Closer than before. I wanted to reach him, to talk to him, and then…this. Walter, what did I do? What’s going on?”

“You’ve crowded him, pushed your consciousness into his mind. If you don’t move out _now_ , you’re going to kill him. Do you hear? You’re going to kill him. His brain can’t handle so much of you in it. Let him breathe.”

“H-how do I do that?”

“How did you do everything else? Olivia, dear, just think it.” 

Not a second later, Peter goes limp. Walter checks his pulse, finds it galloping widely but slowing down, the process scaffolded. Props the boy up, envelops him in the blanket, puts his arms around him. He rocks. He makes low, crooning noises. At some point, Peter surfaces, returns to consciousness.

“Dad?”

“I’m here, Peter.” Walter sighs. He tightens his embrace, breathes in his son’s scent. “I’m here.”

“Dad...am I insane?”

*

Insanity remains, after thousands of years of mystifying humanity, one of those things that owns definitions galore and explanations aplenty, each and every one of them at some point proven a sham, a lie, a pagan’s belief, an immigrant’s hope, an illiterate’s dream. In tradition with today’s religion, science itself dictates him quite sane.

At least according to the extra set of brain waves discerned from all three rounds of Walter-invasive testing. Which—coupled with the voice in his head that now only speaks when addressed because she’s characteristically ashamed of things she couldn’t control, and failed to contain—places on the table another impossible situation.

The dream, Walter explains, was his brain’s way of interpreting, and coping with, Olivia’s unwitting siege of its natural barriers. So, clearly, the Academy Award for most twisted performance goes to the happy combo of his underused wits and his underpaid imagination. He’s not sure why it surprised him this much.

Astrid breaks the silence. “Why now?”

“What?” Walter asks, looking startled as he’s pulled back from the tests and the readings.

“It’s been three months. Why is she only able to reach out now?”

“Peter, is she aware that it has been that long?”

 _No,_ Olivia says, inside his mind. It’s gonna be a bitch, getting used to that. As he thinks that, he can feel her smile. She’s still a little shy. 

“No,” he relays over to Walter. “No she’s not.”

Walter nods. Clearly, he was expecting that response. “She’s the center of a time anomaly, Peter. She’s not experiencing the flow of it the way you or I would. For her, it might be a second, a minute, perhaps a day since last you spoke.”

That little tidbit of information probably has enough bang to make it fucked-up-moment number eight-hundred and five. After giving himself a second to digest it, he asks, “Okay, so, I understand why I collapsed last night—I mean, becoming a biological antennae’s bound to be traumatic and stuff, but why do I suddenly have test results like the health of a cold corpse?”

“I’m afraid I will not be certain of this without further testing, but I believe it is you, Peter, that has been keeping Olivia alive. I believe part of her mind has made a refuge of yours, and keeping the both of you alive has been more than your body can withstand for long periods of time. At least without a strict super-caloric diet or some sort of treatment to keep your immune system up. In fact, I posit that what you’re experiencing is not dissimilar to pregnancy.”

“Awesome, Walter. Thank you for the image.”

“Well, you are very much living for two, son.”

“Stop. I get what you mean…I think. Just stop.” _And you, stop laughing._

_Technically, I’m not. This is all in your head, remember?_

“Aside from that,” Walter continues, undeterred by Peter’s clear discomfort, “you may also be unconsciously reflecting those habits of Olivia’s that are less than healthy, perhaps as a psychosomatic response to your emotional state. Your insomnia, your lack of appetite, those are all adopted behaviors, and they are all originally hers. Am I missing any?”

“I keep counting things. Anything and everything resembling a sequence.” Peter leans  back on the dentist’s chair. “Numbers soothe her,” he explains. 

“Is that even possible?” Astrid asks, unconvinced but curious. Full of wonder, the way she’s always been.

“Oh, certainly. Organ transplants, my dear!” 

“Organ transplants.” Confused, Astrid frowns. “How is that an answer, Walter?”

Peter smiles, falls back into old patterns, tried-and-true habits. He translates, “Sometimes, after surgery, organ transplant recipients have been recorded as adopting tendencies their donors had before they died. Like suddenly developing a taste for onions when they used to hate them, or disliking a certain color that hadn’t bothered them before. It’s the only concrete proof we have for something resembling cellular memory. But Walter, that doesn’t explain anything. I didn’t have a brain transplant, she’s just _there._ ”

“Ah, yes, I was getting to that. You must understand, the amount of energy necessary to spark that reaction, to tear holes in both universes and lead them here, is exponentially larger to that required to keep those same wormholes stabilized. The former necessitated energy from all the subjects in the circle, channelled through Olivia, who, already being able to shift her body’s resonance to match either side’s acted as a sort of tuning fork for the rooms we’re standing in now to adjust their pitch to. The latter needed only Olivia herself to sustain it, but it needed all of Olivia, all of the time. 

This is why she now lies in a coma, instead of here with us—shutting down was her last line of defense, the only way her brain had to minimize lasting damage. Now, Peter, yours was the closest organism, the closest consciousness to her own, when she created the bridge, yes? It may be that, during that first burst of energy released, parts of her electric field signature bled into yours. With her own body in peril, some portion of her mind may have then instinctively migrated to yours.”

“You know how that sounds, don’t you?” Peter asks. Astrid remains still and quiet beside him. 

“Yes, quite well,” Walter says. “I have found through experience, however, that insane propositions ofter carry the truth. There is something else.”

“What is it?”

“I believe that, now that I know how she works, we can bring her home.”

From Olivia, a sharp intake of breath. Peter asks, _what’s wrong? Are you okay?_

 _I’m good. It’s just…I can feel you. You’re_ happy _._

 _Yeah._ All is not lost. They can bring her home. _Yeah, I guess I am._

He’d forgotten the feeling of hope. “What do you propose?”

 


End file.
